Intro music.
I work at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. My job entails being a public affairs information specialist.
Public affairs means I'm a public affairs officer and my job involves being a spokesman for the news
media primarily, but also to the general public, as well.
I've been a launch commentator since about 1983. It's really a twofold thing. Primarily,
I look at it as a conduit from the launch control center in the firing room to the outside world.
There's a lot of preparation that goes into a launch commentary on launch day.
A lot of it involves becoming thoroughly familiar with the countdown procedure but in addition, you have to pull
together a lot of the background of the mission, all of the video that we want to show that
supports what the spacecraft or what the astronauts will be doing, and what we've done to get ready for that.
In addition to that, the expectation that we're going to have things to work that we don't
anticipate. So, that there are particular areas of a mission or of a countdown that we need to
bone-up on each time, because we know as we go along, there are particular points in a countdown
where, if you're going to have a problem, that's where it's going to occur. So you want to be fully
familiar with those systems and the kind of things that can happen and be sure that how you are
going to explain it is actually accurate. You work in advance with the NASA test director or the
launch director or some of the engineers to be sure that you are fully familiar with some of these
different parts of the countdown or of the launch vehicle.
(Launch of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit)
John Glenn. When he came for launch on the space shuttle, that was my first chance to meet a living legend and to find out
what he was really like was quite a thrill, because I found that he has a love for this place like all the employees do here.
And he never sloughed anybody off, even though he was on a deadline. And that, I think, is a great personal thrill for me,
was to meet him, to talk with him, to find out that he was everything I'd hoped that someone of his stature would be.
It's such a fulfilling area to go into because you're in something that advances us as a nation and as a race of people.
So it's a very good thing, a good career to pursue, and especially right now,
because we're past the point where -- it's not just the government. It's commercial interest and it's our international partners,
and everybody has got growing roles now in space, but they're different than what they used to be.
I think the most rewarding part is that when a launch has gone well
(Launch of NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery, STS-114) and you feel that you've done a good job in that countdown,
and then it lifts off and it actually gets into space and the whole thing has gone perfectly, then you have a very good feeling,
knowing that you did a very good job in that and that you were part of that mission. That's the rewarding thing to me,
it is that so many of these missions are historic, and for me, particularly, the planetary flights.
And to have done one of the launch commentaries, to be able to look back and say, you know,
how successful that was, and that I was, was part of that. It's a great feeling.
I'm George Diller, a NASA launch commentator, and a public affairs information specialist at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.